The House of Richard B. Hall

Dan Dorfsman

If there was one thing I regret in my life, it’s all the laughing. Laughing harms, laughing haunts. Nothing ever hurt more than the laughing. Now I peak out windows of my own home, never leaving, never wanting, they’re always laughing. I see them crawling through the dirt I used to kill worms in as a child. They hang from trees I hung from. They do anything and everything. On my front lawn they roast local ducks, in my backyard they carve skulls into rocks, on the sides of my house they dig holes and piss in them. But no matter what they do, nothing can hurt more than night, when they stand, stare, point and laugh. “Liar, Liar” they scream. One of them, Billy Ronstat yells, “Should have been a still birth, should have been a mouse, should have been more sincere, should have been born a skeleton.” Hundreds of them, standing in a square around my house, holding hands, all night, every night, laughing.
I peak out windows at them. There was Randel, my friend from baby times. I did wrong by that young boy. Tied him up and pulled his hair for fun, read his diary. In middle school there was Rachel Donner, never liked her much, she liked me, used to cut herself for me, I used to want to cut her too.
Once I looked out and saw blond Mrs. Dugan. She laughed hardest of them all. I remember finding her and Roberto, a student, in the Boys Locker room, his pressed hams against the benches and her figure on top, ass and all. Roberto cried when I squealed on them. “The only woman I’ll ever love,” he sobbed from a gaping maw. “You fuck.” But I loved her too and the superintendent of schools fired her, not me, my fault she moved to Canada, I loved her too. Mrs. Dugan and Roberto laugh and point at my home, at my life. Dear god let me sleep. One time, when the white snow crystalled on my front porch, the phone rang. It was mother.
“Son,” she cried, I could hear her tears dropping plop plop on the phone. “Why do you do this. Leave your house son. You’re not well, I’ll make you well. You know mommy will always make her little boy well.”
“I can’t mother.”
“Why, why can’t you.”
“I’m afraid mother. They laugh so hard mother. What will happen when I am exposed.”
“You exposed us.” Screamed a voice from outside. “Don’t forget. Tell your dear sick mother how you jeered at our innards, our exposed innards.”
“Mother I’m sorry.”
“Get help Richard. Christ is with you always, if you expose yourself to him.”
“They’ll nail me to a cross.” I said. “Just like your Christ.”
“Never again will you speak like that. There is no one there Richard. No one.” She hung up then. She said there was no one there. But there was, I saw them with my own eyes, heard them with my own ears. I fed from grubs and moss. I drank rain. It was always raining. This is what they’d done to me.
In the springtime, I gazed out through a hole in a loose board, inches in width in my wall. I saw Becky from the University. I recalled.
I met Becky on a Sunday at mass. She was a handsome girl. Mother introduced us. We picnicked together that same day. Still in our church clothes. She fell in love with my sincerity, I fell in love with her gaze. Every day since we would picnic. And when it rained, we hid in the tool shed. I would put a sheet over my head and play the vampire. She’d be the heroine. As I went to suck her blood, she’d let me until it rose into a hickey. Then when the rain was gone, I’d carry her home so that water would not seep into her shoes. She was wide-eyed and always innocent. Until I defiled her. I was Dr. Jeckel and Mister Hyde. She was the scared maiden. I got caught up in the game though and as she cried like in those movies that mother always gave me a nickel to see I growled and grunted a monster. She lost the baby and herself when she went to drown herself in the raging river. She was the only dead body among them, but she was alive as ever. Only now she wasn’t pretty as a flower. She was the monster now. She bore fangs and she cackled.
On this morning, this red morning, or evening. Never cared. I took to my haven in the basement, they could never see me there. I read from “Catcher in the Rye.” Holden saw a young boy who had just died, fell out a dormitory window. He looked at the boy’s bloodiness, but couldn’t really. I felt sick and decapitated. Where was my head I thought never a head to be found down here? I think better up there. Why? Why this world where screams make me know. I know and understand when I see them. Down here I just escape and trap myself, like medicine in a vial. I have a purpose, but I’ve been here for ages.
Dust bit at my nostrils with the cold air. I saw a box from years ago that I had not opened in so long. I did. I went through papers of grades, progress reports, notes from psychiatrists to mother. “He fears death,” one said. “He fears life,” said another. One said. “Richard is a creator, he creates worlds for himself, none of which exist. He cowers in the corners of these worlds, afraid to venture. He hurts others to feel. He feels from pain. Richard is in need. He needs to feel, yet he is so afraid that he cannot find the place to breathe fresh air and discover himself. He has all the characteristics of a human, still he doesn’t feel like one.” I laughed at that. “I am the creator,” I yelled. I screamed it so loud my throat burned right away. I was not used to speaking above a whisper. “You have created nothing,” yelled a voice from outside. “You have created everything,” said a voice behind me. I squealed like a rat as a reeled around. I shielded my face, until I realized.
“After years of plagues that never touched your bones, why do you create your hell,” said my father. I cried out and fell into his shoulder, his sweater smelled as it did so long ago. In those days, before his death. I sobbed there for a long time. “Father, nothing ever hurt me since you left us.”
“No one left you son. You left you. You left your mother. They laugh because they know it’s you who can stop it all. Start what you finish and finish what you start.”
In a poof, on my red day, my beautiful red morning or evening, my father left again, in a poof. I sat crying. The dust stung my throat. I bit my lip till it bled onto my shirt. The laughing began outside. I recalled.
This time I though of Billy Ronstat. I wish he’d never been born I had told him. At age 12, he was my knight; my best friend and I loved him more than anyone. I never had a friend really, before or since. He told me jokes and I’d tell him some, spilling us into fits of laughter until our jowls ached and we could feel the organs above our bowels quake and shimmy. Blood pumped when we laughed, I could hardly breathe. There was a day, a pretty blue day. Billy and I were caressing a fallen bird. We had picked it up from under it’s nest and brought it home in a shoebox. We fed it milk through a medicine dropper. He had a sibling bird, we thought it had been crushed but when I threw a stick at it, it squealed. It looked crushed, I swear it was. This living bird, the one that we knew was alive, stayed in my room for weeks. Billy’s mother would not let him have the bird for fear of disease. Still, he came over everyday and we nursed our bird.
So on this day, this pretty blue day, Billy and I were sitting by a tree that had toppled when lightning struck it’s base.
“My mom is scared,” he said.
“Why?”
“She heard that you go the shrink guy. It scared her, she thinks your psycho or something.”
“The shrink doesn’t tell me anything I don’t know already. He says I hurt people.”
“You never hurt me.”
“Why would I,” I said. “You’re my friend.”
A week later I saw Billy on the playground with a group of kids I didn’t know. I went over to them.
“Hey,” I said. It was a beautiful day.
“Oh hi,” said Billy.
“Who’s rat boy,” said one of the boys.
“Fuck you,” I said. “C’mon Billy.”
But he didn’t come. He just said something like. “Fuck you dweeb. Go find some cheese rat boy.” The other laughed. I ran home barely seeing through tears in my eyes. I picked up that shoebox and I brought it to Billy’s. He was home now. I could see him watching “Flinstones.” I picked up the dying bird it through it through the window. It crashed on impact, along with the head of the bird, spilling blood, glass and gore all over. It wasn’t like the gore Billy and I watched in horror flicks. This was real. Billy ran crying from the house, he tackled me and we wrestled. He kicked me hard while I was on the ground, but I found the chance to trip him up. I yanked his ears at the same time and started beating his dirty skull into the sidewalk. I just banged his head harder and harder until he fainted. I ran home throwing up on the way.
I never really saw Billy Ronstat again. After the fight his family brought the town against us and we left. We moved to a small Okie town. I didn’t see Billy Ronstat until I peered out my window; he was the one that caught my eye first.
I ascended the stairs again. All the way to my bedroom on the top floor and peered out. There they were. I started laughing and screaming. “All of you,” I screamed. “You haunt me, but you haunt me in my mind. It is not my mind that matters. I don’t need it. I banish you.”
With that, they came forward, slowly at first, then running. They ran for days towards my house. Everytime I looked out, they were running never getting closer, then on the seventh day, I heard a crash and in came a bird, flying through the kitchen and flying out through another window which had been smashed by Rachel Donner. They came into my house. One of them hit me with a board that they had pulled out of the floor. Then another jabbed me with a nail from the wall. All of them grabbed my home and beat me, beat me hard. They stopped suddenly and Billy approached with Becky who was now holding a baby. I lay bloody on the floor but I could see the child as they handed him to me, it’s bloated body, it’s blue body, it’s drowned, living, smiling body and I laughed. Nothing hurt more than the laughing. I laughed so hard my jowls ached. One-by-one they left the house.


The Sunday Reader

The house of Richard B. Hall collapsed on beacon road yesterday due to loose boards and poor foundation. Firefighters searched the fallen house. The body of Richard B. Hall, a hermit to his neighbors, lay beneath the rubble in a huddled mass. One fireman who discovered the body had this to say. “His body was crushed, except for his face. He seemed at ease. He almost looked as if he was smiling.” What could have made this man smile as his house came crashing down? There is no explanation anyone can see. Still there is one thing we know for certain. Yesterday marked the passing, of the house of Richard B. Hall.

-Thomas Jonas